“The question of desirable grief and pain or the necessity for it must also be faced. [Are] growth and self-fulfillment possible at all without pain and grief and sorrow and turmoil? If grief and pa...”

“It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”

“It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.”

“If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.”

“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.”

“We fear our highest possibilities. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under conditions of great courage. We enjoy and even thrill to godlike po...”

“Question everythingno matter how beloved, or how long-held, or how exaltedwithout apology. Only those who build their world upon lies need fear an inquisitive mind. The truth will remain, even afte...”

“I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while t...”

“We live in an unbelieving age but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual. There is one type of modern man who recognizes spirit in himself but who fails to recognize a being outside himself...”

“Im aware of my actions and responsible for them, so I dont owe any explanation to anyone.”

“I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.”

“He's a tourist. He takes pictures of people's lives, puts them in a scrapbook, and moves on. All he's interested in is stories. Basically Leslie, he's selfish. And you're not. That's why you don't ...”

“The sight of a worm excites my reverence more than all the gods men have invented.”

“For the natural polytheist, whose gods arise in and from the natural material world ... Our gods not only have transcendent eyes and metaphysical hands. They have antlers and feathers, hooves and s...”

“I sing to you of many more gods, gods of wind and water, gods of each mineral and the events that created them. I sing to you of the gods of protons, of quarks, of atomic forces binding and holding...”